The ground-breaking online Kate Modern project, which ran on the social network site Bebo, has stretched the boundaries of what online content providers and advertisers now expect from the medium. A high degree of interactivity, serious traffic volumes and significant profits have made the whole industry sit up and take notice.
Ziv Navoth, assistant vice-president of marketing and business developments at AOL People Networks, which now owns Bebo, says that before Kate Modern there had been few examples of video content produced specifically for the internet. "It was mostly film and TV clips chopped into small bits," he says.
All that changed when Navoth and the Bebo team met Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried, the creators of lonelygirl15, an online drama that the pair had loaded onto You Tube. "We were impressed, but curious about their funding model. It turned out to consist of their credit cards."
The idea of funding content by integrating advertiser messages is as old as the original soap operas in the early days of TV that were sponsored by soap companies. But Bebo had previously come up against the brick walls of the limited budgets held by online marketers within companies. The breakthrough came when they started pitching to TV buyers within agencies with their larger budgets.
Beckett and Goodfried, by now having formed their own company, Eqal, created the concept of Kate Modern to appeal to Bebo's core audience of 13- to 24-year-olds. The story centred around the murder of Kate and her friends' attempts to discover who killed her. Four minute episodes appeared six times a week, beginning in July last year.
Advertisers were offered a package that included the number of video episodes the brand would feature in, together with more traditional banners around the screen. Procter & Gamble was an early sponsor; Bebo went on to sign up Microsoft, Orange, Paramount and Disney/Buena Vista for the first series, with Toyota, Warner Bros, Cadbury and Mars joining in for the second. The central challenge, says Navoth, was to find ways to integrate advertisers' messages into the action without it looking clunky to viewers.
"It all comes back to the integrity of the story. People don't often name-check brands in normal conversation so it would stick out a mile if we had. But there are many ways that we can weave a product into the action so it looks natural."
Lead writer Luke Hyams would come along to pitches and talk about his ideas for these kinds of "integrations". For Cadbury Crème Egg he used the device of having one of his characters work for a PR agency - with Cadbury as a client. A scene set in Leicester Square had a character dressed in a Crème Egg costume, running around the square.
The Kate team worked hard to engender a strong relationship between the drama and its Bebo audience. A writer was employed to spend all his time replying to messages sent to the drama's characters by fans, and characters would record video-diaries direct to camera, addressing the audience and answering their questions.
Fans would also often be invited to come along to filming and take part as extras, blurring the divide between fiction and reality even further.
Although the drama had a four-week production turnaround for each of the four-minute daily episodes, events would sometimes force a far shorter lead time, mostly so that Hyams could take account of fan reactions.
"We got a lot of negative responses when one of the characters, Lee, was effectively being bullied while on work experience. We decided to ramp up the bullying as it had struck such a nerve. I learnt in the first series that you have to get people talking about it for the drama to be a success."
The buzz that erupted around Kate Modern was obvious by its final day, on June 28 this year. A dozen episodes were shown in 12 hours, with many viewers watching them as they were uploaded. The show averaged an audience of 1.5m each week.
Profit-making
Audiences were not the only ones who were happy. Although Navoth will not disclose exact figures it is clear that Kate made a profit. The nine advertisers individually paid between £100,000 and £300,000 for each of the two six-month seasons. These figures will no doubt have impressed AOL, which bought Bebo mid way through the second series.
In true online style, Bebo has moved quickly to capitalise on its success with Kate. It is now running four original series; reality show The Gap Year, and dramas Sofia's Diary, The Secret World of Sam King and Spinning Jenny. Each have sponsors; Gap Year has proved particularly popular with 13 brands attached to it. Navoth however believes the optimal number of sponsors for any drama "is probably between five and 10. Any more than that would be a nightmare of co-ordination."
Weblink
Kate Modern: bebo.com/katemodern
